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About
Welch's piercing, intimate, slightly fictionalized, and posthumously published work deals with the bicycle accident that would cause his death thirteen years later At age twenty, Denton Welch was bicycling from London, where he was studying art, to Surrey to pay a visit to his aunt and uncle when he was struck by a car. The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back, unable to move, gazing up at the sky, scarcely aware of anything but the sensation of grass against the back of his neck and the sound of a voice asking him questions. As he swam in and out of consciousness, nurses, doctors, and relatives came and went, days passed, and he remained bedridden in a hospital ward. In his characteristic unsparing prose, Welch takes readers through every step of his painful journey toward a partial recovery. Full of unflinching self-scrutiny, A Voice Through a Cloud is an unforgettable work of pain and healing.
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Reviews
"I can think of no writer who has described extreme physical and mental agony with a more appalling vividness. . . . The real horror implicit in the book is that pain is the only reality."
William S. Burroughs
"An incomparable account of shattered flesh and refracted spirit . . . Though Welch had the abilities of a novelist, misfortune made him a kind of prophet, and it is as a prophetic document, a proclamation of our terrible fragility, that his valediction should be treasured."
John Updike, The New Yorker
"When asked what writer has most directly influenced my own work I can answer without hesitation: Denton Welch."
William S. Burroughs